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Seems Jonah Lehrer's penchant for cooking up quotes and committing plagiarism dates back further than we knew. Probing Lehrer's old blogs for Wired, science reporter Charles Seife uncovered many instances of Lehrer recycling material, copying press releases, messing with quotes, and even messing with the facts. "Unlike recycling, plagiarism and fabrication are fundamental betrayals of the reader's trust. ... And betraying the reader is the cardinal sin in journalism," Seife writes at Slate.

Seife got to interview Lehrer for 90 minutes about it, but can't legally quote or even sum up their talk. "But what I can say is that a number of his responses to my questions made me suspect that Lehrer's journalistic moral compass is badly broken," writes Seife. One caveat, though: While older reporters had editors vetting their work, Lehrer "rose to the very top in a flash, and ... was operating, most of the time, without a safety net. Nobody noticed that something was amiss until it was too late to save him."

Another example of the issue I addressed in that horrendous hit piece on Armstrong. Journalism is dead in America. These people are nothing but corporate stooges doing hit jobs on whatever subject their corporate masters want. They are incompetent, many don't have legitimate journalism degrees, they lack any ethics, and they are so eager to please their corporate masters they just fabricate or steal to please. Murdoch and Fox led the way to the demise of journalism in America. We were warned about the Australian thug and now we have very little if any legitimate and researched news. It is all trash journalsim and I use the term journalism loosely.